Re: [Adonthell-general] some questions

[Kai Sterker]

On 5/12/06, Alexander Hupfer <address@hidden> wrote:

> An action attack event is triggered by the player. So depeding of the
> characters weapon you might have an area in which enemies will be
> affected by the attack. To calculate the damage on the enemies I have
> to know which of them are within this area. This however will require
> some vector mathematics similar to colission detection. So, would you
> like to do this in python or is there (or will there be) an engine
> based function to do this?

Good question. I imagine that the engine would have to provide hooks
for that. It's basically the same when you want to initiate dialogue
or pick up items. It should be the mapengine that returns objects of
interest and the script then needs to decide what to do with those. I
think it is like this in the v0.3 code, although the only possible
actions there where talk and look.


> Another thing is, that I'm a little bit confused by the item system.
> What is the advantage to integrate that functionality into the engine
> and not using python? As it is not a time critical part I don't see
> the reason to take away flexibility for the sake of performance.

The main motivation of doing it like this was to actually have some
fixed foundations other people can work from. That's how I see the C++
part of the engine anyway. There are probably plenty of other parts of
the engine that could have easily been written in Python, but somehow
I feel that would make stuff less solid. May sound weird, I know, but
that's basically the reason why the item system is the way it is.

Part of it might also been historic, as we've started with C++ and
added a little scripting here and there. Actually, in the beginning
there was no Python but a custom little interpreter which we happily
dropped after Mark Howson convinced us about how much better Python
could be. Sadly, he didn't have the chance to contribute more than the
first bit of Python bindings :-(.

But back to the topic: I agree that inventory management might be a
little restrictive the way it is right now, although it should still
allow for a fair amount of ways to put it to use. Items themselves
shouldn't have many restrictions, as long as the provided item
handlers like pick up, drop, use, etc ... are sufficient for what
people plan to do with items. If you do find any restrictions though
that had better been removed, then we should definitely do that.

Kai